Garbage

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The more I spend time reflecting on the state of garbage here, the more that time passes and I grow accustomed to a life where the air is hard to breathe, water is polluted, and most public space is adorned with refuse. Each day it seems to shock me less, so I feel as if I need to put my impressions down now before I grow completely desensitized to it or fool myself into thinking that even though I live here, I am not part of the problem. I hesitate to write this because I don’t want to paint a poor representation of Nepali people or dampen the happy-go-lucky spirit of my blog too much. Here I go anyway!

In Kathmandu, the air is thick, almost acrid. Jam-packed streets carry 2 or 3 times the capacity of traffic they are intended to handle. The various vehicles that rule the road are at least a generation old, poorly manufactured and poorly maintained. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if a decent percentage of these vehicles in Kathmandu don’t even have catalytic converters. Aside from cars, a perhaps larger offender is the air waste that is generated by the valley’s hundreds and hundreds of brick factories. The smoke from these factories, as well as from the large piles of garbage that are burned on a regular basis, make visibility poor and breathing a nightmare. It is estimated that living in such conditions is just as bad as smoking 2 packs of cigarettes/day. Every now and then I try to jog to stay in shape. I have to stop after 15 mins because of the pain in my lungs. It is sad to think that it is probably healthier for me to not jog at all than to do so in this air. I can understand why all the athletes were complaining prior to the Beijing Olympics (where I am sure the pollution is even worse).

There is no clean water in Kathmandu. The Bagmati River is filled with trash, human waste, animal waste, animal carcasses, dead bodies (or so I have been told, and I believe it) and anything else you can think of. There are squatter communities situated at various points along the river. There you can observe people washing and collecting water everyday. At Pashupatinath Temple, one of the most sacred sites in all of the Hindu religion, pilgrims will travel from all over the world to bathe in this water as a way of performing ritually cleansing.

Like I said, garbage is everywhere and is always being burned. Burning garbage is not a good smell. And it is not like there is a system to the burning from what I can tell. Piles are lit and left be, at all times of the day. The other day, from one of the larger piles of trash in Kirtipur, I witnessed a garbage avalanche.

This all seems very unsavory and in many respects it is. One of our recent lectures was from a Cornell grad that is an environmental engineer and he shed some light on the situation here. From what I gather, it is not so much that the waste itself it the problem, but rather the way that it is managed. 70 percent of all the garbage in Kathmandu is organic and could be used for composting. If proper separation and collection of the non-organic took place, much of those scraps could be reused. This lecturer also spoke of how he has developed some easily installable rainwater catchment systems, grey water systems and a toileting system that turns waste into fertilizer and biofuel. Hearing this, my attitude has changed a bit knowing that there are some solutions available and that there is some hope that the situation will ameliorate. I suppose, then, that the tragedy of the state of pollution in Kathmandu is not that so much waste exists, but that so much of the waste is going to waste.

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Comments

[kmp]

damn it
the place is fucked. stop jogging. come home. i remember the burning trash in india and the terrible breathing conditions. i would rather smoke half a pack of cigarettes per day and enjoy them and do less damage to my lungs etc. but f- me anyway. sorry, i don't mean to dark out your blog. everything just seems so terrible though.